The adhesion of dirt onto surfaces, or biofouling, poses a problem not just in general livelihood, but also in a wide variety of industries. However, fouling relating to biofilm occurs. The term “biofilm” employed herein refers to the adhesion of organics or microorganisms in water, which begin secreting mucus, growing, and causing a thin film to be formed. Once this film changes the surface properties of the original material, it can easily cause the adhesion of algae or shellfish.
The accumulation of biofouling will gradually damage materials and properties. Hence, various anti-fouling materials or anti-adhesion material development is now an important issue. The current methods for measuring the anti-fouling or anti-sticking ability of a material are contact angle measurement, microbiological culturing, and washing the material of the surface and calculating the number of residual fouling. The disadvantage of the contact angle method is that it only determines hydrophilic or hydrophobic, and is unable to actually measure the anti-sticking ability of the dirt on surfaces. Only calculating the surface amount is imprecise because uneven residual dirt on the surface will lead to misleading results and affect the performance of the product. Cultured microorganisms or cleaning the surface are time-consuming and lead to the evaluation much costs.
Another method for evaluation of biofouling is ASTM gold standard verification (ASTM D6990: Standard Practice for Evaluating Biofouling Resistance and Physical Performance of Marine Coating Systems). In this method, the antifouling evaluation is based on calculating the adhesion area of dirt on the surface after soaking the antifouling material in water for a few weeks to several months.
The above methods require a long time, and can even take several weeks or months. Therefore, a novel, quick, and accurate method for determining the antifouling ability of a material surface is called for to solve the above problems.